Paul Grimsley | Buzzazz Advertising & Marketing Agencyhttp://buzzazz.com
Tampa Bay's # 1 Marketing FirmTue, 22 May 2018 18:36:48 +0000en-UShourly1Compassionate Techhttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/compassionate-tech
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/compassionate-tech#respondThu, 17 May 2018 22:24:20 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=7016What Problems Cannot be Solved If Energy And Care Are Applied To Them? Compassionate tech is apparently a big thing in the UK, where the tech sector grew 2.6 times faster than the rest of the UK economy. Private start-ups are using technology to help society’s most vulnerable people – giving them a way to […]

]]>What Problems Cannot be Solved If Energy And Care Are Applied To Them?

Compassionate tech is apparently a big thing in the UK, where the tech sector grew 2.6 times faster than the rest of the UK economy. Private start-ups are using technology to help society’s most vulnerable people – giving them a way to get onto the runway where they might be able to secure a job and lift themselves out of the situation they find themselves.

It’s not a bad idea – throwing people a lifeline that consists of something practical that can be applied to the situation and used to fix it, rather than a hand out, which does little but allow the person to subsist in the state they already find themselves in.

Tech innovation is also targeting areas that are not often seen as markets for technology – the elderly, whose lives can be made easier if they have access to devices that are made with them in mind, such as Komp.

These kind of things can be arrived at it if you don’t approach the whole field with an attitude of one size fits all, because that reductive way of thinking about things really doesn’t help anyone, and can miss cause you to miss a whole slew of opportunities.

Technology Can Be Inclusive

Think about your own business, and you have surely encountered situations where you find that your customers or clients need something that is a little bit more bespoke, and if you are inflexible, and can’t think about the problem from the viewpoint of the person using it, your chances for expansion may be drastically curtailed. Technology should never be merely prescriptive – it also needs to be able to encompass difference, and to evolve where necessary.

Imagine for instance that you had a website built four or five years ago, and the programming language changed, and the Google requirements changed, but you were still sticking to your guns and pushing that old iteration of the technology – you are going to be standing still while everyone else has moved on. Horse and cart don’t really cut it if you want to be in the freight shipping business, and technology that doesn’t answer to the needs of its users likewise falls short of what people want.

Facebook is having to evolve – irrespective of whether the change is cosmetic or more far-reaching, the environment is not the same now as it was when it first came onto the market. Google is a different beast that has grown and shed many different parts along the way. Microsoft also has a very observable evolutionary arc that isn’t only represented by the move from Clippy to Cortana.

Technology is used to solve problems, so there shouldn’t be much out there that can’t be analysed and fixed.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/compassionate-tech/feed0Here Together With Facebook Foreverhttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/together-facebook-forever
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/together-facebook-forever#respondThu, 10 May 2018 20:26:45 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6987Public Relations Isn’t About Spin, It’s About Honestly Promoting What You Have Done When you are working on fixing your reputation excuses are perhaps not the best policy, nor is glossing over it. If you can tackle it head on and provide real solutions to the problems you created then all the better. Sometimes you […]

Public Relations Isn’t About Spin,
It’s About Honestly Promoting What You Have Done

When you are working on fixing your reputation excuses are perhaps not the best policy, nor is glossing over it. If you can tackle it head on and provide real solutions to the problems you created then all the better. Sometimes you may just be able to talk about the good things you are doing now, because it is in the past and you can’t build a time machine to go back and undo it. If it appears that you are only doing something because you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar, that really does communicate as well, and the apologies don’t come off as sincere, and that causes people to question the validity of the solutions.

If you have been caught doing the same thing over and over and apologize and then just go back to the same old practice why even bother even mounting a defense and pushing the idea that it will all change? If this has been your pattern and people still stick with you there is hardly much motivation to change your behavior. Brief flares of anger and then sinking back into apathy is going to have a destabilizing effect that is gradually going to have to erode the value of the service you deliver, and though it may not deter the people who are already locked into the surface it is going to turn off the floating voters and those not already on board.

Some people trusted their data to be kept safe, but an article called Why Zuckerberg’s 14 Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook that has been doing the rounds illustrates why this may be unrealistic. At one point Myspace occupied a similar place to Facebook, so the notion that the social media platform is immune to some kind of exodus of its users is more than a little presumptuous.

In Order To Promote You Have To Have Done Or Be Doing Something

At various points in its lifetime it has been touted as a possible platform which could be used as a basis for a planet-wide interconnectivity that would radically alter the structure of society. Given the effect that it was used to create in not only the US Election, but also Brexit, might it not be argued that that has already come to pass?

It is true that Facebook has, and continues to facilitate connections with people that you may have lost contact with from your past, and that it has a lot of functionality that makes it a very useful tool. It would be disingenuous to argue otherwise, but it is also true that it has some issues when it comes to the distortion of both information and societal structure that it represents and engenders. The proliferation of echo chambers and selection out of competing narratives by various algorithms leads to atomized groups that are even less able to have a conversation with each other than they have been able to historically. To all intents and purposes with the attenuated information streams that they have access to, they live in completely different worlds, and that is in no way a good thing.

I understand the temptation of people to seek out like-minded people, and to avoid narratives that challenge their own viewpoint, but the presence of these things in their life means they have to think out their own position and have to be able to communicate it. Non-bipartisan action in both houses has seemed not only strained but extremely limited and unlikely of late – so the notion of just pushing motions through against the objections of those with whom you should be working in order to achieve a consensus that represents the best interests of everybody has become par for the course. It is actually running against the grain of how a democracy or representative democracies work. There has to be a way to modulate a news-feed without upsetting everyone

So, the Here Together advert, what to make of it? Is it positing Facebook as a victim of the problem as well? Is an appeal to nostalgia, and a very short apology supposed to make it all OK? You could almost miss the apology – it is of a similar nature to those retractions newspapers print three pages in in the smallest font available, after the Headline they printed above the original story almost didn’t fit on the front page.

Is an interrogation of Zuckerberg that was less than pointed supposed to provide closure? It all seems a little glib, and a very surface engagement with the problem and the upset it has caused, and doesn’t really instill much confidence in the notion that it has all changed.

When you really engage in public relations actions, you need to be doing something good that helps other people that you can promote. The real cornerstone of any PR action though has to be truth. If you build the whole thing on a lie it is going to be like a table with a wobbly leg. If you promise something you have to deliver it, because you will get caught in the lie. It is easier than ever to track down what you said in the past and hold you accountable for it.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. How do you police a system that is ripe to be gamed? Did the money get handed back? Isn’t a government going to have more resources than a private company to mount attacks that are more sophisticated than those already mounted? And this one wasn’t that sophisticated. The data that was sold wasn’t a data breach or a leak – it was the result of a transaction that operated within the parameters that were laid out by Facebook. It happened under the nose of everyone who thoughtlessly checked a box. Maybe if Facebook said Hey, you get the service for free, and one of the realities of that is, that in order to provide this for you we need to generate revenue, and that means selling your data. Sometimes this means that bad people will get your data and they will try to manipulate you with it, and then everyone will be forewarned. Maybe. It would at least ring true.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/together-facebook-forever/feed0Drug Free America – Pam Bondi & Keanan Kintzelhttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/charity/drug-free-america-pam-bondi-keanan-kintzel
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/charity/drug-free-america-pam-bondi-keanan-kintzel#respondFri, 27 Apr 2018 19:33:29 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6957Drug Free America Are Helping To Handling The Drug Problem! Drugs are a problem that affect a lot of people, and with the wide-ranging issues caused by the Opioid Epidemic, and the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs, it is not just recreational drugs that are in the spotlight any more. Drug education is becoming increasingly important, […]

Drugs are a problem that affect a lot of people, and with the wide-ranging issues caused by the Opioid Epidemic, and the over-prescription of psychiatric drugs, it is not just recreational drugs that are in the spotlight any more. Drug education is becoming increasingly important, and action is needed to really handle the problem. Organisations that provide real solutions and ways to implement programs that both help those addicted to drugs, and prevent the younger generation from getting addicted are vital.

The Drug Free America Foundation is right there at the forefront of this fight, and right there with them are a whole host of organisations operating on both a local and national level. Buzzazz Business Solutions, and their President Keanan Kintzel, together with Patrick Clouden of CES and The Concerned Businessmen’s Association of Tampa Bay have been very active in enlightening people locally about the dangers of everything from cannabis to opioids, and even some of the newer drugs on the market that are having a negative effect on society.

The Drug Free America Banquet, held at the historic Fort Harrison Resort, was designed to celebrate and honor Community Leaders and Law Enforcement, who have helped through efforts in education and prevention to help create a drug free world. In attendance was Pam Bondi, the Attorney General for the state of Florida; Senator Darryl Rouson; Ron and Joyce Wanek; State Representative Berny Jacques; Patrick Clouden, Kathy Wach and Lynn Posyton of CES, and many others, all actively involved in helping to handle the drug problem.

Both Drug Free America, and the Concerned Businessmen’s Association are great sources of information about the effects of the drugs that are causing the problem, and the solutions that are being put in place.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/charity/drug-free-america-pam-bondi-keanan-kintzel/feed0A Shift To Lyfthttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/business/a-shift-to-lyft
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/business/a-shift-to-lyft#respondFri, 20 Apr 2018 18:14:46 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6950Lyft Over Uber? Lyft has good customer service, and half of that comes through it being fast and efficient. Uber has no real recourse for riders having issues in the field, other than slow burn emails that are unlikely to get answered in the kind of timeframe you need when you are stranded because of […]

Lyft has good customer service, and half of that comes through it being fast and efficient. Uber has no real recourse for riders having issues in the field, other than slow burn emails that are unlikely to get answered in the kind of timeframe you need when you are stranded because of an error in your Uber app.
Lyft drivers seem to be happier as well. Sure, you don’t get the notion that everything is necessarily perfect – but I have got the sense that driving Lyft is lifting the drivers out of situations that they consider a bind and the situation is the issue, not driving for Lyft. Uber drivers grumble a lot more, and I am not going to name names because I realize that these guys are trying to make a living, and reporting them for being a little disgruntled about income versus outgoing expenses is understandable.

Lyft doesn’t seem to have generated as much bad PR as we have seen from Uber, and I wonder why that is – is it because Lyft piggybacks in on the tide that Uber creates. Are Uber bumping up against problems because they are pioneering their concept into these areas?

It was just announced that Lyft are investing millions to offset the environmental impact of their ride sharing service, while conversely Uber are being reported on for having a spying program running that targets Lyft drivers. It is not the first story of its kind against Uber.

So, they pay their drivers better, and they charge their riders less, and they have great customer service – this is what I have picked up on. The best people for advertising the internal workings of these companies are the employees, and it is not like you have to dig too much. It used to be that people would volunteer the data because they would get a referral bonus for getting you hooked up as a driver as well, but now, all you really need to do is ask someone about their life and they let rip.

Uber has increased their promotional efforts, and is sharing the stories of their drivers, and giving you interesting facts about your own usage of the service, but some of that would be better spent on proactive customer service, rather than reactive PR designed to smooth ruffled feathers. Could there be a mass migration? Anything is possible. I think we are starting to enter a phase where too big to go bust is not being allowed for anyone – it is a healthy way for the market to be.

If you service your customers, and you take care of your workers, you are going to continue doing good business. If the perception is that you don’t care about either, no amount of PR is going to smooth over the cracks.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/business/a-shift-to-lyft/feed0You Should Have An App! We Build Apps!http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/you-should-have-an-app-we-build-apps
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/you-should-have-an-app-we-build-apps#respondTue, 03 Apr 2018 20:50:12 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6846Apps Are Essential Apps are where it is at. Considering that a growing number of people who are interacting with your website are doing so through their phone, or that more and more people are using apps instead of websites to access the data and services that they use, why don’t you have an app? […]

Considering that a growing number of people who are interacting with your website are doing so through their phone, or that more and more people are using apps instead of websites to access the data and services that they use, why don’t you have an app?

The quality of apps has increased a lot, and it continues to keep rising, driven by Apple amongst others, and companies themselves, that want to give their users the best possible experience. Apps answer problems that people have, and they allow companies to more easily deliver the solutions to their customers or their prospective customers.

Imagine that you want to tell your client about something that you are doing that they will love, but you are concerned that the message will just hit the spam filters and bounce away into oblivion – with an app that your customer has willingly downloaded, that need never happen.

Word of mouth is a very good way of spreading the news about your business, and it always had been. What about if you have an app that allows your customers to refer their friends to your business and then you can easily reward them through a loyalty program or some such scheme that lets you thank them for helping you?

An app on the front screen of a phone is there for easy access – you are creating a way to directly communicate to your customers and for them to communicate to you. If there is one thing that is guaranteed to make someone feel good about being associated with your company it is having a direct and easy way to communicate with you.

Call Us Today To Find Out More About Getting Your App Built!

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/you-should-have-an-app-we-build-apps/feed0Horizon Smart Glasses Give Blind Users A Virtual Guidehttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/business/horizon-smart-glasses-give-blind-users-virtual-guide
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/business/horizon-smart-glasses-give-blind-users-virtual-guide#respondTue, 27 Mar 2018 20:28:27 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6836How Much Are You Helping People With Your Tech? Does your technology help someone? In some basic sense it probably helps in some way, even if its sole purpose is to provide escapism. But when you see something that could possibly change the way that someone lives their life, there is something that resonates about […]

Does your technology help someone? In some basic sense it probably helps in some way, even if its sole purpose is to provide escapism. But when you see something that could possibly change the way that someone lives their life, there is something that resonates about it.

Every time something comes along with this potential it definitely reminds of what the true purpose of technology is. Gadgets and widgets are cool, and all the novelty items are interesting, but what kind of change are they going to bring about in the world and in anyone’s life.

A lot of tech seems in many ways to have plateaued, and the forward movement in those fields is purely measured in terms of scale – what is the storage capacity, the processor speed, the size of the object? After the i-pad became part of the landscape, the various iterations of it lost something of the novelty value that they had. PC to laptop, to tablet, to phablet, to phone, to various sized hand-held or maybe a leap to wearables. One thing is an analogue of another thing, is a scaled up or scaled down version of something else. The excitement factor seems exaggerated when the muted design equivalents of wheelspins in a cul-de-sac are teased out to fill a news cycle already bloated with nothingness.

These glasses from Horizon, with their potential to change the way that blind people navigate through a space, seems somewhat basic presently – allowing a guide to see where the person is, and then to communicate to them about their surroundings, but just think what that means to someone who may be using what constitutes a very basic means of navigation, such as a stick or sonar, and it represents a move from third party solutions that Horizon has bolted together, to a pair of smart glasses that they have built from the ground up with their users in mind.

Horizon Are Building A Device From The Ground Up For Their Users

The glasses integrate a 120-degree wide-angle camera, which helps the guides get a fuller picture. It is controlled by physical buttons and can be routed through the mobile app. They are also developing a digital assistant for the set-up. This kind of innovation, that helps people to function more fully in the world at large, and to overcome any obstacles they may have, really is where we should be focusing out attention. Working to cater to necessity rather than convenience would mean that we would be helped where we need it and not encouraged to become lazy by having things done for us that we are completely capable of doing ourselves.

If technology situates itself at the border of the territory where we are unable to venture and helps us to conquer that space, it will really be doing something useful. Reinforcing bad habits that cause people to develop an unhealthy relationship with their technology is not a great idea.

Apple’s push to help those in education is a great example of where the focus should be, and with more companies doing this, or developing products like these glasses, a better future really can be built.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/business/horizon-smart-glasses-give-blind-users-virtual-guide/feed0Cat Ears On Your Car Vending Machinehttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/cat-ears-on-your-car-vending-machine
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/cat-ears-on-your-car-vending-machine#respondMon, 26 Mar 2018 20:36:14 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6833Technology Needs A Sense Of Humor Everything shall be automated. Some people posit this as being a bad thing, and some people celebrate the convenience it represents. A giant car vending machine for me is closer to the kind of future I want – there is humor there, and it provides a welcome relief from […]

Everything shall be automated. Some people posit this as being a bad thing, and some people celebrate the convenience it represents. A giant car vending machine for me is closer to the kind of future I want – there is humor there, and it provides a welcome relief from the dystopian overtones. Unfortunately the likelihood of being able to bump the vending machine and get an extra car is probably pretty slim.

Wacky but practical machines is where we should be at, because to be honest the future seems fairly beige so far. If you think back to the fifties and the sixties, and even the seventies, the designs for the future were pretty out there. I don’t think that it was all the drugs that made this popular – I think that there was a lot more of a problem solving mindset being employed, that saw the problems as being surmountable if you just sat down and thought about it.

I love the mad scientist aspects that Elon Musk brings to the game, and Richard Bransen has some of that going on too. We need pitch battles of intellect between figures like Edison and Tesla to inspire new generations of thinkers. Stephen Hawking represented a very big source of inspiration for people, and his announcements would generate a lot of interest. Keeping things moving along and people thinking outside the box is very conducive to solving problems in ways that we might not have thought of otherwise.

It is always interesting to see how much interest the science community has in science fiction, and vice versa – almost as if imagination primes the pump, for the real work of science. Arthur C. Clarke, Star Trek, Batman – there are a number of people and shows working in the realms of imagination that are sources of direct inspiration for scientific developments.

Lets Build A Fun Future!

I always wondered why there weren’t more production lines spun out of concept cars, but aspects of these designs seem to slowly filter through. Cars used to seem so much more interesting in the fifties, with all those muscle cars, and each automobile maker invested in creating something that looked and felt different – nowadays, without a badge on the front you could pass through the sea of SUVs and not be faulted for failing to know which was which.

I am not sure I like living in an era where all the significant changes are under the hood – it is my biggest problem with Apple – that things still look the same, and only the software and the internal hardware changes. I liked the flare that Jobs provided – giving us an aesthetic as much as a functional object. Most computers are kind of ugly boxes that are carrying cases for a portal via which you can access the world – Jobs used to communicate the magic in this. Musk does some of that. Bransen does some of that. But there is not enough.

I suppose beige is cheap. Magnolia paint is cheap. Burgers are cheap. Find the mold and pump it out, and everyone will love the cookie-cutter product. We should be worried less about being taken over by robots than becoming robots. you have to throw the human in there – have to throw the curveball; have to promote the sense of humor, and save the whole enterprise from being a snorefest. Put cat ears and eyes on your car vending machine.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/cat-ears-on-your-car-vending-machine/feed0More Mobile Friendlyhttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/more-mobile-friendly
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/more-mobile-friendly#respondThu, 22 Mar 2018 15:41:56 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6822Mobile friendly websites are the thing. People carry their computers around with them now in their pockets. They want to be able to find data on the go, so it makes sense that your website should be friendly to these devices. People do not want to have work to get the data from your site, […]

]]>Mobile friendly websites are the thing. People carry their computers around with them now in their pockets. They want to be able to find data on the go, so it makes sense that your website should be friendly to these devices. People do not want to have work to get the data from your site, and if it takes them too long to find it they are going to go elsewhere.

More And More People Are Using Their Mobile Devices

More people than ever are using their phone or mobile device to find things. A lot of searches are done on the move, and a lot of reviews or comments are posted pretty close to the point of the visit – Google has really capitalized on this a lot with their Local Guides program, which is linked to Maps, and knows when you have visited a place. You get a prompt when you are there, or just after, and your reviews and interactions are incentivised.

When someone uses Google to find your site, if it is mobile friendly it is going to show up higher in the search terms, than a site built using older technology. Google want their users to have a better experience, so everything is geared towards making sites more user friendly, and towards rewarding people who put these changes in effect.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/technology/more-mobile-friendly/feed0Societal Mediationhttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/societal-mediation
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/societal-mediation#respondTue, 20 Mar 2018 15:07:51 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6818A Social Media Evolution May Be Underway Social media is just a set of tools that are bolted together and left to grow in the laboratory that is the world. A platform from which something is launched. A filter that mediates communication between people, with some algorithmic biases. Social media really is the black mirror […]

Social media is just a set of tools that are bolted together and left to grow in the laboratory that is the world. A platform from which something is launched. A filter that mediates communication between people, with some algorithmic biases. Social media really is the black mirror – a screen that reflects back at people whatever aspects of their character they choose to display. Or it is an influencer in its own right that hides behind the idea of a free-floating hive mind that is left to be policed by the algorithms and policies of creators asleep at the wheel.

Myspace was a personalized corner of the web, where you could encrust the place with digital trinkets, and fly your freak flag. Facebook anonymized everyone and created isolated herds who could only hear the sounds of the like-minded. I know a lot of people for whom Twitter became little more than a link-blogging feed-dump, after the trolls drowned out the dialogue in feedback. Facebook was somewhere you could share things, but that is becoming harder as Facebook becomes more about being everything to everyone. Amazon hasn’t really branched into it too much, but they did buy Goodreads, which socializes reading, their initial source of bread and butter. Amazon has fingers in many pies, so who knows what will happen if Facebook doesn’t pull out of the critical nosedive it seems to be in?

Warren Ellis, still thought of as Internet Jesus for some, shifted from a big web presence and his own social media platforms to an offline network linked by newsletters, and he is talking about a return to blogging. At least with blogging you could really feel the impact of the signal, and you didn’t have the soft interaction noise of shallow connections that most social media measures its efficacy in.

Part of this feels like a very middle-aged discussion though, affecting primarily people of a certain age who expected to replicate something from IRL in the digital realm, and were disappointed that they used an architecture that can be manipulated to a point where it appeared sturdy on the surface, while crumbling at some deep structural level that is more suggestive of an existential crisis than a data management problem. The kids don’t care – they are invested elsewhere, and they are using the internet differently.

I feel like my generation went diving into cyberspace with a virtual aqualung, but these kids were born being able to breathe the atmosphere, and what seems like an attenuated space to me, to them is a natural environment; a native habitat. I was there from the start, as it clunked into life, and I’ve evolved my use to match my early adopter tendencies. The problem is, seeing it as an analogue means you are expecting it to behave in the way that your original models worked, and I don’t think the younger generations have that notional stumbling block.

All The Broken Things May Not Get Fixed, They May Get Replaced Wholesale

The ecosystem is changing because the dream we had for it met the meat grinder of commerce, and the viewpoint that saw it as a tool for mass manipulation. People are looking to personalize their areas again and break the connections to all the flows that drag in their content and their attention and make them feel and act a certain way. Culture has seemed to be accelerating and rolling through blip culture iterations for a long time, and it is as if the internet is nearing the end of the lumbering dinosaur big box phase, and may be about topple over into artisan territory. In the same way small towns need their little mom and pop type stores again, the internet is going to be a divided territory, between those who like beefburgers mass produced, and those who like something a little more special. Over-extension and infrastructural issues are starting to make themselves felt everywhere – the small businessman and the grass-roots movement is where it is going to be at. Like the re-set button is being hit. What is happening in government is a mirror of what is happening societally, and that is happening in technology too – disruption as a modus operandi destabilizes the stable datum of what something is and how it is going to be used, and so surfing the wave of change becomes the necessary operating basis … either that or you get behind the wave and you drive it. Those are the choices – influencer or adaptive user.

Evolution is something that comes to all culture. Remix culture went through similar iterations – recycle and recycle and recycle until you hot the point where you have to start making some original sounds to keep the world spinning. Facebook does Facebook really well, and a lot of the nascent websites trying to step up to the plate haven’t been able to beat it at its own game. Maybe that isn’t the game anymore. Facebook came along and had such a large impact that the other networks started to change the way that they did things – Twitter’s free-fall for a while seemed sponsored by their obsession with beating Facebook, and they lost, for a while, what made them unique. Myspace fell from grace and then tanked.

Whatever it is that is churning up the dust along the horizon hasn’t come into view yet, but hopefully the shape of social media doesn’t look anything like what we have now. Who knows, it may be built on the back of one the makeshift structures that are driving social change at the moment. The mirror only needs to stay black if we don’t work out some way to make it reflect something brighter, and that has to be possible. The desire to have to facilitate the same kind of interactions and relationships and means of moving data around, and transmitting ideas to people, may be a misstep – what we may need to do it is wait for the current models to get broken apart and gutted, and for something totally alien that comes along and force us to learn how to walk again.

]]>http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/societal-mediation/feed0Let’s Spread Some Good Newshttp://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/lets-spread-good-news
http://buzzazz.com/advertising-and-marketing/lets-spread-good-news#respondMon, 12 Mar 2018 18:46:54 +0000http://buzzazz.com/?p=6810Just Imagine If Everyone Thought About Solutions Rather Than Problems This seems like an unlikely thing to be said in a meeting with any News Editor – that he tells you to go out there and dig up some feel-good stories. Bad News sells, right? That is the old adage that gets trotted out, but […]

]]>Just Imagine If Everyone Thought About Solutions Rather Than Problems

This seems like an unlikely thing to be said in a meeting with any News Editor – that he tells you to go out there and dig up some feel-good stories. Bad News sells, right? That is the old adage that gets trotted out, but how true is it? Do people really want to just sit around and read about other people’s misfortune? That seems like a really sad state of affairs.

Bad news – it distorts the picture of what is happening in the world. Think of the interactions you have in the week and put them into two columns – do you think they are likely to come out in the ratios that the News would have us believe exists? That everything is bad and the whole world is going down the tubes?

Over two thirds of stories on a news segment seem to be bad, with your cherry on top human interest story at the end. If life were really like this would so many people actually make it through the day?

Type in good news to most search engines and you don’t get what you might expect, at least not at the moment. The word “news” has been more than a little tarnished in conversations lately, so it is perhaps understandable that the same is true of the term good news. Good news is fungible with real news it seems. Bad news is likewise synonymous with fake news.

Bad News Is A Distortion Of The Real Picture

This site seemed to be mostly good news, but even here a little bit of bad news had seeped in. It’s a hard thing to control it seems, if you automate any aspect of your site.

I’m not advocating looking at the world in a way that obfuscates real problems, but is there really a problem that doesn’t have some kind of solution? I mean obviously, if you are talking about some incurable disease then there may not be an actual definitive solution, but you can include something about any advances in the field. Solution free reporting means you are just giving your readers a problem, and with their own problems forming a bedrock in their life, the last thing they want are more unsolvable situations. It makes people turn off from the news, and that means they become ill-informed, and when people think about what is going on in the news they can only talk about it in terms of intractable problems.

Wouldn’t it be so much better if people talked in terms of possible solutions? Solutions offer hope, and hopeful people are much more enjoyable to talk to. You would be looking at the problems through the right of the telescope and seeing them as thing that could be overcome, and this would make them more likely to get solved.